Sage 100

It seems to me that over the years I always hear about the accounting group needing to restore from backup and ""IT"" was not backing up and never let accounting know. So in the end they have to restore from backup from days/weeks/months ago. We had one a few years back that lost a whole year (ok 8 months, but they had to restore back to the end of the year backup). What I was thinking is to create some backup process in MAS. Something that would backup MAS 90 folder (and maybe the alternate directories used in MAS as well as the paths to the PDF files). The program would alert to backups that didn't work from a screen or notice in MAS (for those with the security permission). It would also about for restoring. The key is to make it where ""IT"" doesn't have to be involved. Just looking to see if it is something users would want and I would need to see what it would take for me to create it. Does it look like there is a need for something like this? If so what would you think your customers would be willing to pay for this?

While at Sage and afterwards had considered this idea as well. It stemmed from a time long ago working at a company where we used Accpac for DOS and had a backup tragedy just like you described. In the wake of ""WTH how do make sure this never happens again"", as a form of redundancy (not to replace tape backup) I asked mgmt to buy an Accpac mod that would auto-zip the company code data on a scheduler or manual zip by pressing hotkey. It was cool it become our SVDATA / SUDATA and our way of restore-with-no-need-for-IT and did avert a future tragedy for us. At Sage, heard the same tragic story several times so I knew could be possible demand for MAS version of this. After Sage, tried to gauge demand on this. It seemed like only clients who had suffered the backup tragedy were willing to consider it. Otherwise it was like ""no we love our BackupExec it works great"" or ""our IT vendor takes care of it - they receive alerts when backup failure occurs"" or ""this tragic story means that company had poor disaster recovery procedures it doesn't apply to us"". Couldn't argue with any of that. This is my own $.02 but I think your market is smaller ma & pa shops, companies with previous history of backup failures (I must've fielded 20 calls in 14 years on this but still represents maybe .003% of cases), and actg depts allowed to make autonomous IT decisions. Also might be better to offer it as a redundant soln not as primary backup process otherwise the ""we already have a backup soln"" response prevails.. In the end, I think you could recover your dev costs and have a small client base that would religiously use the product. Whether it would be profitable long term well ....

I agree with Alnoor. If there were an easy way to include this I believe customers would likely not pay -- unless in the past they experienced serious data loss. Small market.

I had 2 instances where clients backups failed (tape AND external disk). One lost 6 months of data and the other I was able to rebuild. Since then, I offer a managed on-line backup (redundant, not primary) that e-mails daily status alerts. Just had occasion to restore one of these clients last week, and they were pretty happy to have it. It's a hard sell for those who haven't had problems though. I expect even less interest once clients move apps to hosted environment.

Would this be different than a batch file that copies the company data and other directories to another server, etc.?

What I was thinking was something just like a batch file that would zip the file to another folder/drive or ftp it somewhere. The key would be that it would or could look to see where the alternate directories are (if used), it would look at the PDF settings to see where to backup the company PDF files. The backup would / could backup the complete MAS90 folder or the individual companies. But the key is that based on permissions, if the backup did not run or is too old it would notify you each time you log into MAS.